The Orange County Sheriff’s Department DUI Enforcement Team holds a DUI/drivers license checkpoint in Aliso Viejo tonight.
It is scheduled to run from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. at an undisclosed intersection.
Locations are generally chosen if they have reputations for drunken-driving stops, arrests, crashes and fatalities.
“When possible, specially trained officers will be available to evaluate those suspected of drug-impaired driving, which now accounts for a growing number of impaired driving crashes,” warns an OCSD advisory.
“In recent years, California has seen a disturbing increase in drug-impaired driving crashes. The OCSD supports the new effort from the Office of Traffic Safety that aims to educate all drivers that ‘DUI Doesn’t Just Mean Booze.’ If you take prescription drugs, particularly those with a driving or operating machinery warning on the label, you might be impaired enough to get a DUI. Marijuana can also be impairing, especially in combination with alcohol or other drugs, and can result in a DUI.”
Which brings to mind this: With California’s recent legalization of recreational cannabis, cops have been receiving specific training to spot drivers who toked before getting behind the wheel. Just because pot is legal, driving on pot is still illegal.
Of course, the best way around all of this is to get a ride with a sober driver.
Funding for the DUI operation comes to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department from a California Office of Traffic Safety grant, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.